


& the beating waves

by Barkour



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:35:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the rest of the world comes in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	& the beating waves

The ocean rocked beneath them; they rocked with it. His armor was cool against her cheek but his breath was warm, his face pressed down into her hair. Raleigh stroked his hand down the slope of her neck, down the curve of her back, the weight of the heel of his hand some grounding thing. His arm tightened around her again. She closed her eyes against the nearness of him and thought: His heart beat in time with her heart, neither echo nor counterpoint but steady accompaniment.

Mako dug her fingers into his shoulder—she wanted, a moment, only to pull him inside her, so much so that the separation of their bodies no longer mattered, the distinction between individuals forgotten—and then she drew back from him. She lifted her jaw.

“If you had died,” she said.

Raleigh touched that nearest corner of her jaw, gently with his first two fingers. The tip of his thumb brushed the underside of her chin, up against the high collar of her own armored suit, sleek along her throat. His eyes dipped. That smile had stuck to his mouth, trapped at the corners.

“You would have lived,” he said. The hand between her shoulders swept up her nape then down again. He touched his forehead to hers; he pressed his brow to her temple; she felt the absence of his touch along her arms, along her calves, more acutely than the rush of his breath along her cheek as he said, “You would have lived,” a second time, softer now than before.

She had felt his loss before—that roar of grief and fear when his brother had been pulled from him, out of the Drift—but she had lived her own losses, too, then and now.

Mako rested her hand along his cheek and said, “You live, too,” because he could not hear her think it. He could not feel it as she felt it, not like this, and that distance swelled before her, swelled so she could not bear it. She could not.

He breathed out and made to lift his head, and as he did so she turned so that she could catch his face in both her hands and hold him there, right there before her, so that she could kiss him lightly once on his dry, sweat-salted lips. His fingers flickered at her back. A muscle in his cheek shivered. They had such little room, so she pressed closer to him after all, pulling him so he came to her, too. He did, pressing to her, his arms surrounding her, his mouth falling open to let her in as she would let him in, and he made a noise, a noise like the noise she made, yearning and small. His lips pulled at her lips. The scrape of his stubble, the crooked turn of his incisor, how the salt in the hollow under his lower lip tasted: all these things she knew. How his shoulders bent down, down to her. How his arms tightened and his fingers spread widely across her back, not to consume her but to become part of her—she felt his pull on her as surely as he must have felt her pull on him. So Mako turned her head and kissed him again, drawing on his lower lip, drawing at his tongue; and Raleigh sighed and she knew he, too, heard their hearts beating together, beating and beating so that the shouts of the medical crew seemed far away and meaningless, drowned out by the warmth of his mouth and the weight of her hands and the quiet rolling of the Pacific beneath their knees.


End file.
